God, I haven’t felt the temptation to exit this earth drama for ages.But yesterday I did.Totally self-indulgent, I know.No way would I leave my baby alone in this cock-eyed, drunken love circus.But I felt like my seams were all busted and my stuffing ripped out, and no one was here to lovingly pack and patch me back together.I felt hopeless.

I have never died like this before.Or maybe I have… but not dared to be entirely sober and in my body?But listen– I’m like *really* dying, while alive.This paragraph goes out to all of you who have been there, or are here now… but have never had the words to articulate the experience.I have watched myself kick and buck and struggle against this dissolution for a while…. rather than simply slipping in and relaxing every muscle, as though this sacred undoing were a hot, fragrant petal-laden bath.I’ve fought to maintain a crusty, crumbling sense of who and what I have known myself to be.For example, before surrendered to the Voice inside and cut off my hair, I desperately clutched at this husk of socially acceptable beauty, femininity, sexiness.Finally I became too weary to fight.I gave in to my inner impulse and became free.Gloriously empty and true.Now I want even more hair off.I want it buzzed down to like a half or quarter inch.As it is, it still feels like too much of a style, a persona, another thing to manage.I want to simply be this exposed face.These deep seeing eyes.This naked heart.

Recently, I’ve been feeling waves of pain that rattle the core of my being.Ed (Serena’s dad) is choosing to stay married to his wife.Just because she is holding on tight.From what he shares with me, it “seems” (though who really knows what worlds and truths lurk beneath all the gleaming seemings of life….) there is no intimacy between them, and hasn’t been for years.I wonder if that can be restored…?It’s not that I want to be with him in the conventional sense….But being locked into that family constellation, consumes him, so that he is not able to show up for Serena (his daughter) or me, much at all.And we are faaaar from welcome over there.This situation aches my soul, deep, deep down.Betrayal.Abandonment.A sprawling chain of crushing disappointments.I often wish I’d never met Ed. (And… I love him so deep.Sometimes it’s just hard to feel beneath the consuming pain.)But then I look at Serena’s perfectly gorgeous face… And I can’t imagine her being made of any other cells and DNA.She’s essential and right and exquisite.

Life is the weirdest.

Another quintessential element of my oh-so-dark mood of late, is that I have been beyond tired.I bled with the new moon last week, and it really sapped me.So I took a nap with Serena yesterday.I went deep enough to have a dream flash that I saw my Ma, walking up the dusty driveway to my house!My mind fritzed, because I was like, wait… how can this be???This surge of confusion struck me awake.I was crushed, because she was coming toward me, and I felt so much joy and relief to see her and then in a flash, she vanished.I lay in bed, still exhausted, and began to quietly cry.I know she was coming to be with me in a time of need…. I know she is so close.Even now… but I’m damn frustrated that I can’t get still enough to experience satisfying communion with her.But even that fleeting mOMent was gold.

Gold…

I’m feeling a deep affinity for gold these days.I yearn to bathe and melt and merge in warm streams of golden light.In a flash, the “still, small voice” inside informed me that I actually AM being showered in this Mighty, healing light, as I come undone.Shazam!!!A lightning (my Ma told schooled me on how to spell “lightning”, after I wrote a blog about the black “lightening” bolt earrings she bought me in town last summer!Thank GOD she set me straight before she ditched me.) flash struck me when I got up to pee just now.I realized that dying is really not bad at all.What it IS, is that our crippled, capitalist society has not designated space and value for this holy and wholly essential and inevitable dimension of Life.It is a deep, dark, fertile space of rebirth and cultivation of wisdom.But instead we are prescribed pharmaceutical drugs and collectively pressured to hold it together and pretend that everything is……………………. FINE.

Haha!!!!!Fine.Why does that tickle me so?“How are you?”…….. “Fine.”It’s just such a flaccid thing we say to each other and ourselves.Fine…..

Suddenly I’m all lit up inside about this matter of dying.Like it’s my activism to give a publicity plug for dying.While I was stirring my hot rice cereal just now, I though bout writing a children’s book, akin to the classic, “Everyone Poops”.Entitled, naturally, “Everyone Dies”.It will talk about how we all die many times over as we navigate this life thing.And of course there’s the “grand finale”, when we leave these cute little meat suits, too.And while not necessarily comfortable, all of it can be graceful and maaaaaybe… even a little bit fabulous.Gosh, I want to master the ART of dying.I want to get really good at it and inspire you to lean into your deaths, and trust the rightness and necessity of these dark and barren passages.I want to stop digging my desperate, dirty nails into the walls of the pit, and just let it swallow me whole, and TRUST that I will certainly rise when the time is ripe.

I’m exhausted from trying to fast-forward this goddamn movie and be in a scene other than the one I am in.I want to play my role so fully and beautifully that it liberates all hearts, purifies the waters and heals the planet.

What if I entirely trusted that my career aspirations and deepest, soul-full desires were inevitable….and I didn’t have to fight the current to fulfill my Destiny?What if this delicious undoing was ESSENTIAL to my being and doing and offering all that I am here to share?

By the Light vested in me, I declare this to be SO.

Three cheers for getting swept up by a linguistic river of impassioned conviction….

Oh!I remembered something crucial that I need to tell you.In the face of wanting to die yesterday, the only natural thing to do was go to the River.Like duh.

Being there… the miracle that I AM, gazing through these eyes beheld the satiny, musical rush of wet, crystalline aqua, dappled with dancing diamond light… a precise half moon, smiling unconditionally amidst deep, blue space. I flooded my lungs with the incense-esque scent wafting softly from the heated, piney earth.I hafta laugh, because I know that even this linguistically gifted mystic could never find words to touch the epic divinity of the world quietly gushing alive before my very blessed eyes.

But here’s the funniest part EVER:It was a clothing optional beach, and Serena, who has been clambering around at the water’s edge, notices two naked men standing near.Her eyes are fixed on one of the dudes’ You Know What… Good Lord… Is she?…Reaching for it???Yes.And repeating a word that at first, I can’t make out.Then it clicks in my brain.“Candle”. I repeat it… “candle?”Nodding affirmative, gaze fixed, she continues to speak this random man’s shlong into enchanted, interpretive existence.I look at the two men, to get a deeper read on the situation.Their eyes are soft and friendly… yet I feel contracted in a wave of embarrassment.I relax, and realize that it’s all okay.My daughter’s precious innocence is not something to take personally, manage (in this case), or be ashamed of.Relaxing open, I crack up.Hard.They laugh too.Serena keeps repeating her mantra.I guess she hasn’t been exposed to too many “candles”….

I HAD to tell someone.It’s a classic case of “If the Pope shits in the woods, and there’s no one there to hear it….”So thanks for allowing that gorgeous mOMent of pure and perfect innocence to take root and fully LIVE.